Continuations

A then hot subject was partial continuations. Among others, Bernard Serpette and I proposed our own set of control operators in POPL92.

I then tried to devise a program transformation for these strange objects. This was done in WSA92 and was in fact nothing but ACPS (abstract continuation passing style from Felleisen, Wand , Friedman and Duba)!

ACPS is a very interesting transformation that makes the stack frames explicit. Given that power, it is possible to explain and compare the various sets of control operators in an uniform framework. This is a very pedagogical paper: LPTR93b, the associated code is there.

Luc Moreau and I produced another set of control operators in PLILP94.

ACPS can also be used to improve compilation: for instance turn automatically a recursive factorial into an iterative one (if multiplication is known to be associative). The technique is exposed in LPTR93a.

While designing a CD-ROM to teach the C programming language, I found an interesting use of continuations where a continuation is the thing that gets invoked when someone presses a web button.


Updated by Christian.Queinnec@lip6.fr
$Id: Continuation.html,v 1.13 2003/01/22 19:56:45 queinnec Exp $